Category: Fearful Symmetry

For almost 20 years, my family and I have been good friends with our neighbors across the street, the Becker’s, who have two sons: Nathan (19) and Dylan (18). The “Becker Boys” are ardent video gamers, and recently got into 40K, with Nate choosing Space Marines, and Dylan picking up Space Wolves.

Back home early from college (thanks, Corona-Chan!), Dylan wanted to get in a game a few weeks ago, so I proposed that we mask- and glove up, keep our social distance, and pit his Wolves against my proxied Chaos Daemons of Khorne.

I’ve been playing 40K with my friend and fellow Jungle Guide Patrick Eibel since the game debuted in 1987. Our games are almost always very casual and fun, and we have a great time.

Often, one of us will surprise the other with a fiendish and blisteringly effective—but perfectly legal—unit, item of wargear, stratagem, formation, or combination thereof. Whereupon, the one being surprised by this power-gaming will good-naturedly ask, “Who let you do that?”

In this series, we showcase armies used by your humble Jungle Guides. By detailing how the army was collected, how the background and color schemes were developed, and how the army is used on the battlefield, we hope that this series will provide inspiration for those interested in collecting similar armies.

In the chilly dark just before dawn, Shamshir Talatra—accompanied, as always, by Panja, the Vedic Great Tyger—surveyed his army. Once again, the Scepter of Shiva, a holy relic in the form of a curved sword, had done its work well, summoning scores of the fearsome rakshasas, greater and lesser, to the material world.

Tiger-headed humanoids from Lankapura, a realm outside of time and space, the rakshasas had terrorized and preyed upon the humans of Veda ever since it was settled, before the Age of Strife. But no longer. Now, they served Shamshir.